Green in Action Honorary Mention

Fairhope Intermediate School

Fairhope, AL

For Green Week, FIS Green Club organized activities to promote ‘Green’ lunches. On April 25th, we held a Waste-Free lunch day at school. Students collected data the day before the waste-free lunch to record what kind of trash they were throwing away, the quantity and how much it weighed. Students completed this same data collection on the waste-free lunch day and then compared it with the data from the previous day. As you might expect, we threw a lot less away on the waste-free lunch day. To make the activity more fun and competitive, the class with the highest number of waste-free lunches won the ‘Green’ sprit award.

On Saturday, April 27th, the Green Club set up a booth at the Mobile Bay Earth Day Festival in Fairhope, AL. The theme of the booth was ‘Greening Your Lunchbox’, which encourages people to use reusable containers, cloth napkins, etc., and buy local and organic food. Students had several different activities designed to teach visitors about what a ‘green’ lunch is and why it is important for the environment. Information about ‘green’ lunchboxes was presented on a trifold and sample lunches were on display-one waste-free lunch and one that was wasteful. Visitors could then practice their new knowledge by picking a mystery lunchbox item out of a bin and say whether it was green or not and why.

Children were invited to draw and color a ‘green’ lunchbox and label its contents. Finally, visitors were asked to sign a green lunchbox pledge. We collected almost 200 signatures! Finally, GC students made sandwich containers out of gallon milk jugs, which they sold at the Earth Day Fest for $3 and are giving 100% of the profit to Mobile Baykeeper, a local agency that helps protect the local environment.